The Day of Days: Chapter 16

Chapter 16

BEELZEBUB

Late enough in all conscience was the last guest to arrive for the Hadley-Owen masquerade.

Already town-cars, carriages, and private 'busses were being called for and departing with their share of the more seasoned and sober-sided revellers, to whom bed and appetite for breakfast had come to mean more than a chance to romp through a cotillion by the light of the rising sun--to say discreetly little or nothing of those other conveyances which had borne away their due proportion of far less sage and by no means sober-sided ones, who yet retained sufficient sense of the fitness of things to realise that bed followed by matutinal bromides would be better for them than further dalliance with the effervescent and evanescent spirits of festivity.

More and more frequently the elevators, empty but for their attendants, were flying up to the famous ball-room floor of the Bizarre, to descend heavy-laden with languid laughing parties of gaily-costumed ladies and gentlemen no less brilliantly attired--prince and pauper, empress and shepherdess, monk, milkmaid, and mountebank: all weary yet reluctant in their going.

And at this hour a smallish gentleman, in an old-style Inverness opera-coat that cloaked him to his ankles, with an opera hat set jauntily a wee bit askew on his head, a mask of crimson silk covering his face from brows to lips, slipped silently like some sly, sinister shadow through the Fifth Avenue portals of the Bizarre, and shaped a course by his wits across the lobby to the elevators, so discreetly and unobtrusively that none of the flunkeys in attendance noticed his arrival.

In effect, he didn't arrive at all, but suddenly was there.

A car, discharging its passengers before the smallish gentleman could catch the eye of its operator, flew suddenly upward in the echo of a gate slammed shut in his face; and all the other cars were still at the top, according to the bronze arrows of their tell-tale dials. The late arrival held up patiently; but after an instant's deliberation, doffed his hat, crushed it flat, slipped out of his voluminous cloak, and beckoned a liveried attendant.

In the costume thus disclosed, he cut an impish figure: "Satan on the half-shell," Peter Kenny had christened him.

A dress coat of black satin fitted P. Sybarite more neatly than him for whom it had been made. The frilled bosom of his shirt was set with winking rubies, and the lace cuffs at his wrists were caught together with rubies--whether real or false, like coals of fire: and ruby was the hue both of his satin mask and his satin small-clothes. Buckles of red paste brilliants burned on the insteps of his slender polished shoes with scarlet heels; and his snug black silk stockings set off ankles and calves so well-turned that the Prince of Sin himself might have taken pride in them. For boutonni�re he wore a smouldering ember--so true an imitation that at first he himself had hesitated to touch it. Literally to crown all, his ruddy hair was twisted upward from each temple in a cornuted fashion that was most vividly picturesque.

"Here," he said, surrendering hat and coat to the servitor before the latter could remonstrate--"take and check these for me, please. I shan't be going for some time yet."

"Sorry, sir, but the cloak-room down 'ere 's closed, sir. You'll have to check them on the ball-room floor above."

"No matter," said the little man: and groping in a pocket, he produced a dollar bill and tendered it to ready fingers; "you keep 'em for me, down here. It'll save time when I'm ready to go."

"Very good, sir. Thank you."

"You won't forget me?"

The flunkey grinned. "You're the only gentleman I've seen to-night, sir, in a costume anything like your own."

"There's but one of me in the Union," said the gentleman, sententious: "my spear knows no brother."

"Thank you, sir," said the servant civilly, making off.

With an air of some dubiety, the little man watched him go.

"I say!" he cried suddenly--"come back!"

He was obeyed.

A second dollar bill appeared as it were by magic between his fingers. The flunkey stared.

"Beg pardon, sir?"

"Take it"--impatiently.

"Thank you." The well-trained fingers executed their most familiar manoeuvre. "But--m'y I ask, sir--wot's it for?"

"You called me a gentleman just now."

"Yes, sir."

"You were right."

"Quite so, sir."

"The devil is a gentleman," the masquerader insisted firmly.

"So I've always 'eard, sir."

"Then you may go; you've earned the other dollar."

Obsequiousness stared: "M'y I ask, 'ow so?"

"By standing for that antediluvian bromidiom. I had to get it off my chest to somebody, or else blow up. Far better to hire an audience when you can't be original. Remember that; you've been paid: you daren't object."

"Thankyousir," said the lackey blankly.

"And now--avaunt--before I brand thee for mine own!"

The little gentleman flung out an imperative, melodramatic arm; and veritable sparks sprayed from his crackling finger-tips. The servant retired in haste and dismay.

"'E's balmy--or screwed--or the Devil 'imself!" he muttered....

Beneath his mask the little man grinned privately at the man's retreat.

"Piker!" said he severely--"sharpening your wits on helpless servants. A waiter has no friends, anyway!"

An elevator, descending, discharged into the lobby half a dozen mirthful maskers. Of these, a Scheherazade of bewitching prettiness (in a cloak of ermine!) singled out the silent, cynical little gentleman in scarlet mask and smalls, and menaced him merrily with a jewelled forefinger.

"What--you, Lucifer! Traitor! Where have you been all evening?"

"Madame!"--he bowed mockingly--"in spirit, always at your ear."

She flushed and bit her lip in charming confusion; while an abbess, with face serene in the frame of her snowy coif, caught up the ball of badinage:

"Ah, in spirit! But in the flesh?"

"Why, poppet!" he retorted in suave surprise--"it isn't possible that you missed me?"

And she, too, coloured; while a third, a girl dressed all in buckskin from beaded hunting-shirt to fringed leggings and dainty moccasins, bent to peer into his face.

"Who are you?" she demanded curiously. "I don't seem to know you--"

"That, child, you have already proved."

"I?... Proved?... How do you mean?"

"You alone have not yet blushed."

And wheeling mischievously to the others, he covered them with widespread hands in burlesque benediction.

"The unction of my deep damnation abide with ye, my children, now and forevermore!" he chanted, showering sparks from crepitant finger-tips; and bounded lightly into the elevator.

"But your mask!" protested Scheherazade in a pet. "You've no right--when we all unmasked at supper."

Through the iron fretwork of the gate, the little gentleman shot a Parthian spark or two.

"I wear no mask!" he informed them solemnly as the car shot from sight.

The conceit tickled him; he had it still in mind when he alighted at the ball-room floor.

Pausing in the anteroom, he struck an artificial pose on his high red heels and stroked thin, satiric lips with slender fingers, reviewing the crush with eyes that glinted light-hearted malice through the scarlet visor; seeking a certain one and finding her not among those many about him--their gay exotic trappings half hidden beneath wraps of modern convention assumed against impending departure.

A hedge of backs hid from him the ball-room, choking the wide, high arch of its entrance.

Turning to one side, he began to pick a slow way through the press, and so presently found himself shoulder to shoulder with elderly and pompous Respectability in a furred great-coat; who, all ready for the street, with shining topper poised at breast-level, had delayed his going for an instant's guarded confabulation with a youngish man conspicuous in this, that he, alone of all that company, was in simple evening dress.

Their backs were toward P. Sybarite, but by the fat pink folds above the back of Respectability's collar and the fat white side-whiskers adorning his plump pink chops, Beelzebub knew that he encountered for the second time that evening Respectability of the gold-capped cane.

Without the least shame, he paused and cocked sharp ears to catch what he could of the conversation between these two.

Little enough he profited by his open eavesdropping; what he heard was scarcely illuminating when applied to the puzzle that haunted him.

"She won't--that's flat," Respectability's companion announced in a sullen voice.

By the tone of this last Beelzebub knew that it issued from an ugly twisted mouth.

"But," Respectability insisted heavily--"You're sure you've done your best to persuade her?"

"She won't listen to reason."

"Well ... everything's arranged. You have me to thank for that."

"Oh," sneered the younger man, "you've done a lot, you have!"

And then, moving to give way to another making toward the elevators, Brian Shaynon discovered at his elbow that small attentive body in sinister scarlet and black.

For a breath, utterance failed the old man. He glared pop-eyed indignation from a congested countenance, his fat lips quivering and his jowls as well; and then as Beelzebub tapped him familiarly if lightly upon the chest, his face turned wholly purple, from swollen temples to pendulous chin.

"Well met, �me damn�e!" P. Sybarite saluted him gaily. "Are you indeed off so early upon my business?"

"Damnation!" exclaimed Brian Shaynon, all but choking.

"It shall surely be your portion," gravely assented the little man. "To all who in my service prosper in a worldly way--damnation, upon my honourable Satanic word!"

"Who the devil--?"

"Whisht!" P. Sybarite reproved. "A trifle more respect, if you please--lest you wake in the morning to find all my benefactions turned to ashes in your strong-boxes!"

But here Respectability found his full voice.

"Who are you?" he demanded so stormily that heads turned curiously his way. "I demand to know! Remove that mask! Impertinent--!"

"Mask?" purred Beelzebub in a tone of wonder. "I wear no mask!"

"No mask!" stammered the older man, in confusion.

"Nay, I am frankly what I am--old Evil's self," P. Sybarite explained blandly; "but you, Brian Shaynon--now you go always masked: waking or sleeping, hypocrisy's your lifelong mask. You see the distinction, old servant?"

In another moment he might have suffered a sound drubbing with the ebony cane but for Peter Kenny's parlour-magic trick. For as Brian Shaynon started forward to seize Beelzebub by the collar, a stream of incandescent sparks shot point-blank into his face; and when he fell back in puffing dismay, Beelzebub laughed provokingly, ducked behind the backs of a brace of highly diverted bystanders, and quickly and deftly wormed his way through the press to the dancing-floor itself.

As for the younger man--he of the unhandsome mouth--P. Sybarite was content to hold him in reserve, to be dealt with later, at his leisure. For the present, his business pressed with the waning night.

In high feather, bubbling with mischief, he sidled along the wall a little way, then halted to familiarise himself with scene and atmosphere against his next move.

But after the first minute or two, spent in silent review of the brilliant scene, his thin lips lost something of their cynic modelling, the eyes behind the scarlet visor something of their mischievous twinkle--softening with shadows envious and regretful.

The room was as one vast pool of limpid golden light, walls and ceilings so luminous with the refulgence of a thousand electric bulbs that they seemed translucent, glowing with a radiance from beyond.

On the famous floor, twelve-score couples swung and swayed to the intoxicating rhythms of an unseen orchestra; kaleidoscopic in their amazingly variegated costuming of colour, drifting past the lonely, diabolical little figure, an endless chain of paired anachronisms.

Searching narrowly each fair face that flashed past in another's arms, he waited with seeming patience. But the music buzzed in his brain and his toes tingled for it; breathing the warm, voluptuous air, he inhaled hints of a thousand agreeable and exciting scenes; watching, he perceived in perturbation the witchery of a hundred exquisite women. And a rancorous discontent gnawed at his famished heart.

This was all his by right of birth--should be his now, but for the blind malice of his sorry destiny. Kismet had favoured him greatly, but too late....

But of a sudden he forgot self-pity and vain repining, in the discovery of the one particular woman swinging dizzily past in the arms of an Incroyable, whose giddy plumage served only to render the more striking her exquisite fairness and the fine simplicity of her costume.

For she was all in the black-and-white uniform of a Blessington shopgirl; black skirt and blouse, stockings and pumps, relieved by showy linen at throat and wrists, with at waist the white patch of a tiny lace-and-linen apron.

Perhaps it was his start of recognition; it may have been the very fixed intensity of his regard; whatever drew it, her gaze veered to his silent and aloof figure, and for an instant his eyes held hers. At once, to his consternation, the hot blood stained her lovely face from throat to brow; her glance wavered, fell in confusion, then as though by a strong effort of will alone, steadied once more to his. Nodding with an air of friendly diffidence, she flashed him a strange, perplexing smile; and was swept on and away.

For a thought he checked his breath in stupefaction. Had she, then, recognised him? Was it possible that her intuition had been keen enough to pierce his disguise, vizard and all?

But the next moment he could have sworn in chagrined appreciation of his colossal stupidity. Of course!--his costume was that worn by Peter Kenny earlier in the evening; and as between Peter and himself, of the same stock, the two were much of a muchness in physique; both, moreover, were red-headed; their points of unlikeness were negligible, given a mask.

So after all, her emotion had been due solely to embarrassment and regret for the pain she had caused poor Peter by refusing his offer of marriage!

Well!... P. Sybarite drew a long, sane breath, laughed wholesomely at himself, and thereafter had eyes only to keep the girl in sight, however far and involved her wanderings through the labyrinth of the dance.

In good time the music ended; the fluent movement of the dancers subsided with a curious effect of eddying--like confetti settling to rest; and P. Sybarite left his station by the wall, slipping like quicksilver through the heart of the throng to the far side of the room, where, near a great high window wide to the night, the breathless shopgirl had dropped into a chair.

At Beelzebub's approach the Incroyable, perhaps mindful of obligations in another quarter, bowed and moved off, leaving the field temporarily quite clear.

She greeted him with a faint recurrence of her former blush.

"Why, Peter!" she cried--and so sealed with confirmation his surmise as to her mistake--"I was wondering what had become of you. I thought you must have gone home."

"Peter did go home," P. Sybarite affirmed gravely, bending over her hand.

His voice perplexed her tremendously. She opened eyes wide.

"Peter!" she exclaimed reproachfully--"you promised it wouldn't make any difference. We were to go on just as always--good friends. And now ..."

"Yes?" P. Sybarite prompted as she faltered.

"I don't like to say it, Peter, but--your voice is so different. You've not been--doing anything foolish, have you?"

"Peter hasn't," the little man lied cheerfully; "Peter went home to sulk like the unwhipped cub he is; and sulking, was yet decent enough to lend me these rags."

"You--you're not Peter Kenny?"

"No more than you are Molly Lessing."

"Molly Lessing! What do you know--? Who can you be? Why are you masked?"

"Simply," he explained pleasantly, "that my incognito may remain such to all save you."

"But--but who are you?"

"It is permitted?" he asked, with a gesture offering to take the tiny printed card of dance engagements that dangled from her fingers by its silken thong.

In dumb mystification the girl surrendered it.

Seating himself beside her, P. Sybarite ran his eye down the list.

"The last was number--which?" he enquired with unruffled impudence.

Half angry, half amused, wholly confused, she told him: "Fifteen."

"Then one number only remains."

His lips hardened as he read the initials pencilled opposite that numeral; they were "B.S."

"Bayard Shaynon?" he queried.

She assented with a nod, her brows gathering.

Coolly, with the miniature pencil attached to the card, he changed the small, faint B to a large black P, strengthened the S to correspond, and added to that ybarite; then with a bow returned the card.

The girl received the evidence of her senses with a silent gasp.

He bowed again: "Yours to command."

"You--Mr. Sybarite!"

"I, Miss Blessington."

"But--incredible!" she cried. "I can't believe you ..."

Facing her, he lifted his scarlet visor, meeting her stare with his wistful and diffident smile.

"You see," he said, readjusting the mask.

"But--what does this mean?"

"Do you remember our talk on the way home after Kismet--four hours or several years ago: which is it?"

"I remember we talked ..."

"And I--clumsily enough, Heaven knows!--told you that I'd go far for one who'd been kind and tolerant to me, if she were in trouble and could use my poor services?"

"I remember--yes."

"You suspected--surely--it was yourself I had in mind?"

"Why, yes; but--"

"And you'll certainly allow that what happened later, at the door, when I stood in the way of the importunate Mr. 'B.S.'--if I'm not sadly in error--was enough to convince any one that you needed a friend's good offices?"

"So," she said softly, with glimmering eyes--"so for that you followed me here, Mr. Sybarite!"

"I wish I might claim it. But it wouldn't be true. No--I didn't follow you."

"Please," she begged, "don't mystify me--"

"I don't mean to. But to tell the truth, my own head is still awhirl with all the chapter of accidents that brought me here. Since you flew off with B.S., following afoot, I've traversed a vast deal of adventure--to wind up here. If," he added, grinning, "this is the wind-up. I've a creepy, crawly feeling that it isn't...."

"Miss Blessington," he pursued seriously, "if you have patience to listen to what I've been through since we parted in Thirty-eighth Street--?" Encouraged by her silence he went on: "I've broken the bank at a gambling house; been held up for my winnings at the pistol's point--but managed to keep them. I've been in a raid and escaped only after committing felonious assault on two detectives. I then burglarised a private residence, and saved the mistress of the house from being murdered by her rascally husband--blundered thence to the deadliest dive in New York--met and slanged mine ancient enemy, the despoiler of my house--took part in a drunken brawl--saved my infatuated young idiot of a cousin, Peter Kenny, from assassination--took him home, borrowed his clothing, and impudently invited myself to this party on the mere suspicion that 'Molly Lessing' and Marian Blessington might be one and the same, after all!... And all, it appears, that I might come at last to beg a favour of you."

"I can't think what it can be," breathed the girl, dumfounded.

"To forgive my unpardonable impertinence--"

"I've not been conscious of it."

"You'll recognise it immediately. I am about to transgress your privacy with a question--two, in fact. Will you tell me, please, in confidence, why you refused my cousin, Peter Kenny, when he asked you to marry him?"

Colouring, she met his eyes honestly.

"Because--why, it was so utterly absurd! He's only a boy. Besides, I don't care for him--that way."

"You care for some one else--'that way'?"

"Yes," said the girl softly, averting her face.

"Is it--Mr. Bayard Shaynon?"

"No," she replied after a perceptible pause.

"But you have promised to marry him?"

"I once made him that promise--yes."

"You mean to keep it?"

"I must."

"Why?"

"It was my father's wish."

"And yet--you don't like him!"

Looking steadily before her, the girl said tensely: "I loathe him."

"Then," cried P. Sybarite in a joyful voice, "I may tell you something: you needn't marry him."

She turned startled eyes to his, incredulous.

"Need not?"

"I should have said can not--"

Through the loud hum of voices that, filling the room, had furnished a cover for their conversation, sounded the opening bars of music for the final dance.

The girl rose suddenly, eyes like stars aflame in a face of snow.

"He will be coming for me now," she said hurriedly. "But--if you mean what you say--I must know--instantly--why you say it. How can we manage to avoid him?"

"This way," said P. Sybarite, indicating the wide window nearby.

Through its draped opening a shallow balcony showed, half-screened by palms whose softly stirring fronds, touched with artificial light, shone a garish green against the sombre sky of night.

Immediately Marian Blessington slipped through the hangings and, turning, beckoned P. Sybarite to follow.

"There's no one here," she announced in accents tremulous with excitement, when he joined her. "Now--now tell me what you mean!"

"One moment," he warned her gently, turning back to the window just as it was darkened by another figure.

The man with the twisted mouth stood there, peering blindly into the semi-obscurity.

"Marian...?" he called in a voice meant to be ingratiating.

"Well?" the girl demanded harshly.

"I thought I saw you," he commented blandly, advancing a pace and so coming face to face with the bristling little Mephistophelean figure, which he had endeavoured to ignore.

"My dance, I believe," he added a trace more brusquely, over the little man's head.

"I must ask you to excuse me," said the girl coldly.

"You don't care to dance again to-night?"

"Thank you--no."

"Then I will give myself the pleasure of sitting it out with you."

"I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me, Bayard," she returned, consistently inflexible.

He hesitated. "Do I understand you're ready for me to take you home?"

"You're to understand that I will neither dance nor sit out the dance with you--and that I don't wish to be disturbed."

"Bless your heart!" P. Sybarite interjected privately.

The voice of the younger Shaynon broke with passion.

"This is--the limit!" he cried violently. "I've reached the end of my endurance. Who's this creature you're with?"

"Is your memory so short?" P. Sybarite asked quietly. "Have you forgotten the microbe?--the little guy who puts the point in disappointment?"

"I've forgotten nothing, you--animal! Nor that you insulted my father publicly only a few minutes ago, you--"

"That is something that takes a bit of doing, too!" affirmed P. Sybarite with a nod.

"And I want to inform you, sir," Shaynon raged, "that you've gone too far by much. I insist that you remove your mask and tell me your name."

"And if I refuse?" said the little man coolly.

"If you refuse--or if you persist in this insolent attitude, sir!--I--I'll--"

"What? In the name of brevity, make up your mind and give it a name, man!"

"I'll thrash you within an inch of your life--here and now!" Shaynon blustered.

"One moment," P. Sybarite pleaded with a graceful gesture. "Before committing yourself to this mad enterprise, would you mind telling me exactly how you spell that word inch? With a capital I and a final e--by any chance?"

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